real or really creative?

Millions(?) of readers who enjoy their daily fix of reading One Child online were outraged (well upset) when the website crashed yesterday, reported in this story on WKIO.

The statement by Enthrill Publishing admitted to installing updates which they believed led to the downtime, but later the real story hit the news.

Trey Miller, ex-CIA agent, now a for-hire international saboteur, and one of the main characters in the popular thriller, is now thought to be the one responsible for hacking into the online reading system.

While the system is down, you can still interact with some of the other characters:

Carson Grant, trader on Wall Street at Platinus Investments (check him out on Facebook) Carson is an MIT graduate hired to create extensive algorithms used in the super computers in his Wall Street firm which make millions of trades daily. Just a little tweak here or there make the computers even faster, but what will that do to the stock market? Is a crash inevitable?



Russell Matthews, a journalist on assignment embedded with soldiers in Afghanistan. He is getting the real story of the war. See him on Facebook and read his blog, Embedded Truth.


See pictures of some of the locations in the book, like this cafe, more pictures here.

Is it real or is it all from the creative mind of author Jeff Buick (pictured in front of Platinus Investments).

Just think of all the work that has gone into this project - of course writing a gripping international thriller and getting it published into book form is quite a feat, but the additional online reading capability, the numerous Facebook pages for the fictional characters, the journalist's blog, the pictures. Some fans even received postcards from book characters.

Is it real or is it Memorex? So are these characters real? They certainly seem so, just look at their pictures. The story is real, told in real time, about real events - the war in Afghanistan, Taliban, IEDs, greedy Wall Street moguls, even a U2 concert.

But the real question - Is this the future of the way we read books, in this electronic information age will we be satisfied to just sit in a comfy chair, hold a worn hardback book to read, or will we need more...